s32108_s3 29/08/2015 09:07 Page 1
Automation at the Core of Sky’s
agile development
Experts at S3 Group explain the benefits of continuous integration in practice.
Focus
Challenge
Solution
Benefits
Sky is one of Europe’s
leading entertainment and
communication companies.
Product quality is a boardlevel focus for Sky. Moving
to a hybrid IP and STB
platform required both
market-leading innovation
and reliability.
Sky introduced continuous
integration best practices to
product development, drawing
on the influences of Agile, XP
and Lean.
Sky’s deployment of
StormTest® Development
Center has streamlined test
cycles and improved product
quality.
They deployed the most
modern tools for development,
integration and test of software.
l Increased software releases
from 1 every 1-2 years up to 4
releases a year
Sky uses automation, powered
by S3 Group’s StormTest® to
support its continuous
integration efforts.
l More than 40% increase in
the level of testing with same
resources
New Product Development is
used to drive its business
forward and deepen
engagement with customers.
At the core of its product
development efforts is the
Sky+ HD box. By connecting
its Sky+ HD box to the
Internet it can quickly add
new functionality and
improve the UI experience.
Customer Background
ew product
development
drives Sky’s
business forward and
deepens engagement with
its customers. Sky’s
adoption of modern
delivery practices,
including Lean, Agile, and
Extreme Programming
methodologies, combined
with continuous
integration processes, has
been fundamental to its
ability to deliver
breakthrough technologies
to market, quickly. This
focus on innovation has
been wedded to
unremitting quality.
Quality has Board level
focus, with Sky’s annual
corporate report
frequently highlighting
quality improvements.
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42 EUROMEDIA
Key to this challenge has
been Sky’s ability to
transform product delivery
processes inside and out,
from a waterfall approach
towards an Agile and testdriven environment.
This challenge required
moving beyond traditional
development and test
approaches.
The Sky+ HD box is the core
product for its customer
experience and product
development efforts. Sky has
revolutionised
the way it
develops
software for
set-top boxes
(STBs), on the
way to
delivering a
connected platform, capitalising
on the possibilities to rapidly
add new functionality and
upgrades to the main User
Interface (UI) for the TV.
Challenge:
shifting left
To deliver on its innovation
agenda with consistently high
quality, Sky had to transform
its development processes. Key
to this transformation was pretesting, executed throughout
the development cycle. This
StormTest is used by
Development, Integration, and
QA to generate trusted
performance and functional
insights, and improve crossteam collaboration.
catches errors earlier, cuts time
between releases and improves
overall software quality.
For Sky, this meant shifting
left its testing, by
running multiple
test suites across
the development
cycle. This sets a
clear quality
benchmark, while
providing early
visibility into build quality,
before it is accepted by the QA
team.
This transformation
required greater collaboration
across teams; reliable insights
into the performance and
functionality of new services;
and a way to increase the
velocity of test cycles. New
processes and technologies
were required to
support the
development of
high quality
l Automation enables testing
to run 24x7
l It has contributed to year on
year reductions in both
customer calls and service
visits
software. Change was required
across Development, System
Integration (SI), and Quality
Assurance (QA) teams.
Enter StormTest®
With rigorous engineering
principles, Sky has sought out
processes and technologies to
support the development of
high quality software. A vital
component of this change to
Agile and Test Driven
Development was the
automation of manual
processes. Sky historically
relied almost exclusively on
manual testing for its STBs. If
closer collaboration was
required across Development,
Integration and QA, there was
early recognition of the need for
best-in-class tools to support